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"By moving the transactions to a private version of the ethereum blockchain, an encrypted copy of the bill of lading is sent to a seller while ING’s platform verifies that pertinent documents comply with the smart contract that defined the terms of the transaction."

Mark, does this mean that the platform is not on the same network currently used to trade Eth tokens? I am wondering if this means that expansion of blockchain tech will not necessarily expand the crypto markets that we trade crypto currencies in. Or maybe it means they use their own private coin token based upon the public Ethereum network - I am not sure. Hope you can explain. Thanks.

Ethereum is an OPEN platform - it is open source, and anybody\everybody is encourage to build cool things on it. In this way it's like the internet. There are a bunch of different protocols that define how higher layers work. Think Email (SMTP) and IRC channels for Instant Messaging as so forth, HTTP itself for the world-wide-web. Bitcoin

As Ethereum is open source, anybody can copy it and make new derivative versions of it. We see this in LISK, and now Qtum - there may be others. This is like all of the 'copy coins' of 2014 that copied bitcoin. Almost all of them were scams back then.

Now if you were a big fortune 500 company and excited by this new 'internet thing' called ethereum. But it hasn't been battle tested because it isn't even two years old. You might want to build a replica of it and sandbox it from the rest of the world so you can experiment with it. This is their own test environment. Also known as 'private ethereum'. Think of 'Intranets" for companies that use the same technology as the internet but close it off with firewalls to the internet itself.

But eventually the companies will want to conduct business together, that's the point of an open network. So the Enterprise Ethereum Aliance was created to set an agreement in the business and governments of the world that they would all agree to stick to the open standards of the public ethereum blockchain. If they find improvements - they will do the proper method of creating a EIP (Ethereum Improvement Proposal) and let the rest of the community evaluate it and try it out on Ethereum's test network before allowing it into the production code. This is formally done by the Ethereum Foundation -non-profit group - and then it is voted on and released to the miners to activate if it's all successful,

None of the companies in the alliance want to deviate too far off course and become an island unable to conduct smart contracts with anybody else because they are no longer interoperable.

You can expect hundreds or thousands of private ethereum networks develop as sometimes you might just need a company behind a firewall to be able to use some of the technology.

I've said this before- but the most important part of an open blockchain is SOCIAL CONSENSUS. The network with the most developers, companies, technology will attract the others and the network effect acts like gravity. It takes something very powerful to convince people to stop what they are doing and change to a different blockchain once they've hitched their horse to that wagon. So expect to see those blockchains come and go (LISK was in the top five in size for a while). But they fizzle as people realize they weren't different and had nobody picking up and moving to those others. Don't fall for pump and dumps,

In the early days of the internet, it was such a strange concept that CEOs of the day- about giving just anybody email. They wanted the technology but without all that 'openness; where anybody could write whatever software they wanted, The best computer people left to work on open, innovative ideas and intranets mostly became stale and obsolete. Youtube, Google Earth, Facebook weren't created inside intranets.

So all of these organizations realize they need to plug into the main backbone chain. They probably won't until the network is more mature. There are still two releases before they consider ethereum 1.0 complete. But there are already plans for ethereum 2.0. That version is being positioned to be the backbone of the next internet...mesh networking (See Elon Musk launching satellites now in supposed prepping for the web 2.0.

There are going to be an assortment of protocols laying on top of ethereum as well. IPFS, Swarm, Whisper to name a few.

It's an exciting time to be an ethereum holder. I've just scratched the surface.

That is a great explanation. Thank you mrees. The internet/intranet analogy makes complete sense.

It is very interesting comparing the growth of Bitcoin a few years ago with the growth of ethereum now. Bitcoin was seen as just a kind of renegade currency and a threat to the establishment. ETH has all these other commercial benefits from blockchain technology that although disruptive, still offer benefits to the establishment. The fact that it is also a means of storing and exchanging wealth seems not to be so threatening this time around. At least not as far as I have seen anyway.

I believe the IGN solutionis completely private right now. This was simply a proof of concept. This will be how probably all established companies will begin.

The purpose of the network is to allow companies that might not trust each other completely - to conduct business with contracts that can't be hidden, changed, denied, censored, or otherwise corrupted or confiscated. This will start in specific industries. Banking, healthcare, supply chain etc. They use their own 'world virtual computer, and have their own trusted peers to do the 'mining' of the transactions.

This is to be expected even for years in some cases. It's possible that some companies and industries completely stay off the public ethereum chain. But this goes back to the 'intranet' comparison. Eventually the developers realize they are being left behind by the rest of the world because they may have isolated themselves. Entire industries will eventually want to connect with other industries, so they will need to plug in to the open ethereum network. But they will all have their own timescales. And this is still speculation as we are still in the wild west frontier stage. I'm just making logical connections that many people agree with looking to the internet, television, Windows\Intel, Radio as historical guides for the network effect. There are interesting charts that compare these adoption rates for Metcalf's law of adoption. I speak more about it in my video series.

New startup companies which are creating entirely new business models are issuing their own token that is based on Etherum (Golem for one example). The value of these will be tied to the value of ethereum itself. Likewise, the value of Ethereum will reflect the net worth of value each of these new business models create as they use the Etherum token and backbone, protection, network effect, and world computer. This is one of the reasons the price could be explosive. They will require eth tokens to operate creating great demand. Eth is schedule to complete the issuance of new tokens at about 100 million so it is already 90% done. After, less than 1% token inflation to replace lost or destroyed tokens that are estimated to reduce the supply yearly. When the cap is reached (less than a year at the current rate) - expect the price to explode again. Everybody will be racing to get the last of them in anticipation.

Hey Mark, it sure is hard to make sensible short term predictions. What a wild weekend of price action! Ripple doubling twice in a few hours in a spectacular pump and dump; ETH then dumped, Bitcoin up and the Poloniex exchange having a dummy spit.

Time to take a deep breath. The fundamentals are good for ETH. But the markets are made by traders, momentum chasers and whales. I won't be surprised if 1 ETH is anywhere between $20 and $800 in 12 months time. Hopefully fundamentals win out.

Should we be worried that Vitalik Buterin is leading this at just 23 years of age? Naive mistakes could be made. Or is ETH much bigger than him now?

The common phrase for long term crypto fans is they call themselves "HODLers"

Hold On for Dear Life

Some of the newbies mistakenly think that HODLers just hold on tight as the Rocket ship to take us to the moon. But it's more accurate to think of us strapped to the rollercoaster goes down just as steep and puts butterflies in your stomach. After a year of huge ups and downs, sleepless nights, and adrenaline rushes - you get use to it. Only then can you earn your "HODLer card".

Remember the whales rule this beast so making predictions is a fools errand for trading. There is no good reason for ripple to do what its done, there was no news but we've seen this before many times with others. Dash, had no good reason to do this either. The whales can get it started - and there are gangs of traders who pull together to start and stop the pumps and dumps. If you don't know who the patsy is... you're the patsy.

I've been burned too many times on the wrong end of the "Fear of Missing Out" bug that I know is so hard to resist. That's what they are counting on. The suckers try to chase these returns. My advice is to try to ease into the opposite for the coins with great fundamentals because that's what the whales will be doing. They want to suck the tide out of the good coins from people selling to jump on the tidal wave. Then when they've pulled out all the weak hands, they rush back in to pick up the solid picks cheaply. Eth is as solid as they come.

Not giving financial advice, but these are my thoughts and what I'm doing:

The big move is April 14, and the whales are going to try to 5x or higher on Eth where they might have only pulled a 2x or 3x with out draining it first. In a sick way - I kind of appreciate it as I can sell a bit of BTC or others to soak up the cheaper ETH while I can. Right now BTC, ETH, Factom are solid long term. If BTC starts heading for more serious fork-talk you might see another drop. Fundamentals always win out in the end.

Vitalik is as smart as they come - I'm investing him him. Because he's attached, I'm taking part in the wetrust.io ICO going on now. It's probably not a coin flipper, so I'm betting it will be another fundamental long-term play. You can't just will-the wisdom to people (Although I wished for it many times raising my daughters). So Vitalik is still loosing his naiveness. He is surrounded by wise people though and learns very quickly. He's got a great temperament and sense of humor (He never misses an April Fools Day joke).

His major cohorts in creating ethereum were Gaven Wood, and Joseph Lubin. Following my instinct to invest in people - the most smartest in the world, with good temperament, pacifist, ecological, and critical of the status-quo, I follow these guys. See the projects they are working on now and don't bet against them.

Just for the fun of it: I sprinkle small amounts of profit at interesting projects all over the blockchain space to see what grows.

Golem and Iconomi are possible moonshots over the next year or two capable of 100x in my opinion. Iconomi will have some competition with the brilliant idea, and they just changed the business model to try and meet the SEC muster and be able to be listed on more exchanges as they decided to throw out the model of paying dividends from profits. Now they are going to take profit and burn the coins they buy back (Send them to unspendable addresses will destroy them). This will enhance the value of all the other coins issued as there will be that much less supply. I thought that was very creative. But they are still ramping up so it's all a high risk.

Golem is aiming to have their rentable distributed supercomputer up in a basic form this year. I don't see any other business mode announced for competition so if they make this thing work - it could be a paradigm game changer. The tokens got down to around 2 cents - so it's already been a 4 bagger for those that dipped their toes in at the bottom. (Wish I would have bought more). Running to 20 cents from 2 cents could be a no-brainer. Going to 2 dollars each is a 100x possibility. I'm thinking to myself that it might be worth sprinkling a bit of (more) spare change that way to see what grows.

I read every word you write here. I am presently waiting for my Ledger Nano and have a 401K dist. in the mail targeted in part at finally taking a position in ETH - I can't not buy more Silver though when it's still only a few bucks more per ounce than extraction costs. Thank you for gracing us with your continuing thoughts on the crypto space.

I'm still a huge fan (and holder) of silver. I get it. Although I did sell some to pay for my shiny (yet invisible) new Roth IRA in bitcoin (bitcoinira.com). I'm still betting that Bitcoin will be worth a lot more in 10-15 years when I retire. And pull it out tax-free would be a nice benefit, provided the country still operates the same way.

Of course, I still have silver to back me up. I was in silver a lot earlier than I found cryptocurrencies. I don't think I would have had the right mindset to study blockchain technology had I not known about hard money and alternative economic theory. Those are the same concepts that make the blockchain ideals work but made traditional 'experts' who didn't understand

Perhaps enough worth of ETH to buy me a room full of silver one day. Silver is a lot prettier than Ether.